Brand project elements
When developing a brand project it’s all about market share
A complete brand project encompasses various vital elements that contribute to establishing a strong and cohesive brand identity.
From strategy development to visual design and implementation, the following components are essential in creating a comprehensive brand project:
10 vital elements in a brand project
Brand Strategy: Define the brand’s purpose, values, and target audience. Conduct market research to identify the brand’s positioning, competitive landscape, and unique selling proposition. Develop a brand strategy that aligns with the organization’s goals and clearly directs all brand activities.- Brand Identity: Create a visual identity system that reflects the brand’s personality and resonates with the target audience. This includes designing a logo, selecting appropriate colors and typography, and creating brand guidelines for consistent application across various touchpoints.
- Brand Messaging: Develop a compelling brand narrative and key messaging that communicates the brand’s values, benefits, and differentiation. Craft a brand voice and tone that aligns with the target audience and reflects the brand’s personality.
- Brand Collateral: Design and produce a range of brand collateral, such as business cards, letterheads, brochures, and presentations that consistently reflect the brand’s visual identity and messaging. These materials should be unified and aligned with the brand strategy.
- Digital Presence: Establish a solid online presence through a well-designed website that showcases the brand’s offerings and effectively communicates the brand’s story. Develop engaging content for social media platforms and create a cohesive digital experience that reflects the brand’s values.
- Brand Experience: Consider all touchpoints where customers interact with the brand online and offline. This includes packaging design, in-store experience, customer service, and product quality. Ensure a consistent brand experience that aligns with the brand strategy and creates a positive impression.
- Internal Branding: Engage employees in the brand project to ensure they understand and embody the brand’s values and messaging. Develop internal communication materials, training programs, and brand guidelines to align the organization’s culture with the brand identity.
- Brand Launch: Develop a strategic plan for launching the brand project, including PR and marketing initiatives. Create buzz and excitement around the new brand identity, engaging key stakeholders and target audiences.
- Brand Monitoring: Implement methods to measure and monitor the brand’s performance and perception. Conduct regular brand audits, customer surveys, and social media monitoring to gauge brand awareness, sentiment, and loyalty. Use this feedback to refine and strengthen the brand over time.
- Brand Evolution: A brand project is not a one-time effort; it requires ongoing maintenance and evolution. Continually assess the brand’s performance, stay attuned to market changes, and adapt the brand strategy to ensure its relevance and competitiveness.
A complete brand project involves the development of a strong brand strategy, the creation of a visually appealing identity, the crafting of compelling messaging, and the establishment of a consistent brand experience across all touchpoints.
Why is branding a project important? Because you cant steal market share without it.
It also requires a well-executed launch plan, ongoing monitoring, and evolution to ensure the brand’s long-term success. But…
You must steal share with any new brand project, or your brand will die.
Are you exploring the idea of starting a rebranding project? Call us right now. A typical Stealing Share brand project takes three months to complete and usually includes market research.
Every project includes our brand audit and behavioral modeling. These processes take the guesswork out of rebranding and set Stealing Share on a different trajectory than other old-school agencies.
Never again settle for old-school branding companies.
Your category changed, and so has rebranding. The problem is other brand companies are stuck in the mud. Being process-driven, they rehash the old brand theories that date back to the 1950s.
If your market is as stagnant as that decade, there is no need to call us.
And if you are not growing, you are dying. Because the marketing landscape has fundamentally changed in the past few decades.
A desperate need exists for a new branding strategy to address these changes. We would argue that there is no such thing as a purely immature market.
But few new product and service offerings create a new category.
Instead, products take share from an existing category. Go back to a few decades ago. Before smartphones and the digital world, that changes in front of our eyes.
Consider the introduction of iPods and other MP3 players. Many marketers argue that they created a new category.
But, in fact, they simply changed an existing category.
Take, for example, portable music players like Walkman. What does this mean when developing a brand project?
It means you need to steal market share if you wish to thrive and grow.
You are stealing it from a competitor or competitive product.
You need to steal from whatever your target audience is doing now to fulfill a need.
Why stealing? Why not just grow?
Because successful brands know they need to be stealthy in their marketing. As Sun Tzu put it so well in The Art of War,” emerge to their surprise.”
You must not tip your hand to the competition to build a solid brand project and effective branding strategy successfully. And you must be both deliberate and quiet.
So, attack the competition with all the advantages of a B-2 Stealth Bomber. Stealing market share is not underhanded. Stealing market share is just plain smart.
So, growing your share and increasing your category dominance means you are stealing the hearts and minds of the customers.
Those who currently satisfy their preceptive needs to the detriment of your competitors. How do you steal share with a brand project and branding strategy? Create a consistent branding strategy for all your communication.
And focus solely on that single brand’s purpose of stealing share. First, when starting a brand project, understand that developing a branding strategy to steal share requires a multi-pronged attack. Plus, you must excite your target audience’s right and left brain.
This means including the right-brain elements of aesthetics and emotion. But also includes the left-brain aspects of truth, logic, and reason. Your brand is a selling argument.
And it needs to muster all the persuasive elements it can and be armed to the hilt with them. Create your branding strategy with execution built around stealing market share. So, stop telling funny or creative stories just to entertain the market.
As a result, a brand project with us starts with projectable market research and competitive analysis. We are reinforcing that positioning and narrowing the branding strategy to focus only on the customer.
Doing this requires understanding and mapping the belief systems. These are the beliefs of the target audience. So, the main touchpoints of aesthetics, emotion, logic, reason, and truth are all addressed.
We invented a model (read about our behavior model here) to do just that. It finds the emotional hot buttons needed for a branding strategy. Behavioral modeling means the best creative work is done with those goals in mind.
For example, public relations decisions are affected by the stealing share concept. And this must guide companies in targeting publications, selecting stories to tell, and developing key messages.
Most branding strategy is about the company itself and its consumer products. So, to steal share, campaigns must be developed with the customer in mind. The campaigns are not about “you” or “it”; they care about them.
We consider ourselves a powerful strategic company because we endeavor to change customers’ buying behavior in a particular market.
How does your brand project work?
The entire process of a brand project is complex and takes committed collaboration between all the parties involved.
As a result, our branding process starts with careful due diligence and thoughtful market research. The market, which includes competitors and customers, must be understood completely. So, we precisely target opportunities both in marketing and business.
The vulnerabilities of each competitor must be examined and understood. As a result, understanding the customers is vitally important.
And not only due to buying habits but also due to their personalities and systems of beliefs. These systems directly influence purchase decisions and preferences. To change behavior, you must understand their lifestyles and personal motivations.
Only then can a company deploy positioning that can be communicated clearly. And the effect of which is measurable in numbers. How do you measure the differences in advertising messages in market research? Market research is fundamental when creating a branding strategy to steal share.
Essentially, you do that by charting them. First, we develop an axis as the basis of the chart, making sure we take a step back and create one that’s fair and honest. And the chart should be designed to reflect the wants and needs of the customers.
And not necessarily just the terrain embraced by industry insiders. A chart developed from careful research often shows that markets are clustered in one area or another.
Thus, pinpointing an area of opportunity. The brand will effectively seize that opportunity if the axis has been developed with the customer in mind.
Doesn’t all branding strategy work and advertising steal share?
Every brand project by Stealing Share focuses on what the market desires and what the market leader is neglecting. You’d be surprised how little advertising changes the category leadership.
This kind of advertising fails to steal share and brand development. It ignores the business needs ultimately. Most strategies and executions are aimed at the company itself or mimic the market leader.
Brand project target Messages and positions spent strictly on what the company feels about its product. And not what customers think about themselves. This wastes money because today’s advertising is built around product benefits.
And that’s not how people choose. So, Stealing Share focuses on what the market desires and what the market leader is neglecting. Stealing Share does not confuse the company’s business with the brand’s business.
Function and category are different from identity and feeling. The business of the company is what you do.
The business of the brand is the definition of your customer. That’s what a Stealing Share brand project addresses.
